GUELPH — Based on hard work alone, Andrew Poon of Guelph should come home from the Redemption muay thai kick-boxing card at Brantford on Saturday night with his first championship belt.

“I don’t know how much of it is natural athletic ability, but he’s been my student for years now and I’ve seen him put in the effort and put in the work and I have seen him grow from an average student who was just coming in to train to who he is now, which is an absolutely phenomenal athlete,” Jay Bathija of Guelph’s Victory Muay Thai said during a break in a training session. “The strength and the co-ordination that he possesses is something that he worked hard for. This kid trains upwards of five or six days a week, multiple times a day. It shows and it’s paid off.”

Poon, 26, became involved in the sport four and a half years ago as simply a way to stay in shape.

“I’d been pretty active throughout most of my life,” he said. “I’d played soccer, football a little bit and did track and field in elementary school. In university, it got to a point where I got a little busy in school and I dropped off the boat for a little while. For about a year and a half, I wasn’t active at all, really. I was just looking to try something different.”

While on a work term in Toronto, he dropped by a muay thai gym that had come recommended by friends.

“I just happened to walk into, what for me was, the right gym,” Poon said. “I caught the bug there really quick and have been training pretty consistently since. My first week there, I was there three times during the week. A couple of weeks in, I was there four times a week and then five and six. For whatever reason, I just really liked it.”

After a year and a half of working out in the sport, Poon decided to get into the competition side of the sport.

“As far as knowledge, he’s well versed but in terms of practical experience in the ring, he’s still a baby,” Bathija said. “He’s still got a long way to go. For his experience level, he’s phenomenal, but he still has a long way to go — which is scary.”

For Poon, competition is nothing to do with getting in shape.

“Fighting’s a terrible way of staying in shape,” he said. “For me, it’s the mental toughness. I figure if you can get into a ring and get pounded from one end of the ring to the other and sort of live through that, there are few other things in life that can really faze you. For me, that’s what it is, that’s what it comes down to. If I can do this, I’m just about ready for anything else.”

Poon, who helps teach muay thai at the University of Waterloo, has been training for his title fight for a couple of months.

“The training frequency and the intensity picks up a fair bit,” he said. “For fighters, we don’t have like in hockey and baseball an off season. You’re pretty active throughout the year. It’s a constant game of peaking and tapering. You always want to be in shape, but you don’t always want to be at peak because you’ll just wear yourself out eventually.”

As muay thai is what Poon teaches and what he competes in, he is a little wary of wearing himself out.

“Last summer, I burned out one time really badly,” he said. “I have this weird policy where I would do a lot of the workouts with my students — sort of a lead by example type of thing. I ended up doing 18 sprint sessions in a week. Any strength coach worth their money would tell you that’s insane, and it was. I did that that week and during that week, I never in my life felt that burned out from training.

“At the end of the week, after my last class and teaching my last set of sprints, after all the student left, in that room where I teach at the university, I laid down on the floor — just right on the floor — and I passed out for half an hour just because I was so out of it.”

With help from a few of his friends at the University of Waterloo, Poon has made his workouts there a little more efficient.

“I’m doing about half the work that I usually do, but I’m in better shape,” he said. “I’m stronger and faster, but I’m doing half the work so it saves a lot of my energy and my focus and my concentration for the skills work.”

And that will serve him well in the ring.

“He’s put the time in and he’s displayed the technique and the skill and he’s definitely earned the right to fight for a title,” Bathija said. “I’m 100 per cent confident he’ll come back with that belt.”